I nodded firmly and Rogue scowled, batting our hands away from her. “You know what’s unacceptable, Johnny James?” She shot a glare at JJ. “Kidnapping people. So as fun as this little throwback isn’t, I’m gonna head out and flirt a cocktail out of a bartender at the nearest surf and turf.”
Heat tore through my chest and I yanked her away from JJ, pushing her back against the fridge and crowding her in there as she narrowed her eyes at me. Ice spilled from her gaze and my brow pinched.
“Hi, Foxy boy,” she said at last, her voice husky and seductive, yet full of rejection and disinterest too. “You got taller.”
“You got mouthier,” I tossed back, the edge to her voice making my dominant side rear up and take notice.
“My tongue can do a lot of things these days that it couldn’t back when we were sixteen,” she said, her eyes as sharp as blades. “It’s called growing up.”
Chase appeared beside me, his muscular shoulder butting against mine and I had the urge to growl at him like a dog. Instead, I forced myself to let one arm drop so he could see the girl we’d all had to let go of a long time ago. Fuck, is she really here? Am I losing my fucking mind?
My dick seemed to be particularly happy about her return and even the momentary image of fucking this new, older, smartass version of Rogue had me hungering for her like I hadn’t for any girl in a long time (see: never).
“Where the fuck did you come from?” Chase demanded and I was glad at least one of us was managing to form sensible questions. I had so many running through my head that I couldn’t choose a single one to demand of her. But my brain was starting to catch up on this headfuck and I was trying to figure out the best way to handle it.
Rogue’s eyes shot to Chase and I didn’t miss the way they dipped to his sculpted chest before they moved back to his face. We sure as shit weren’t boys anymore and it looked like she was living in her own headfuck as she realised that. With the amount of testosterone in this house, I was surprised the kitchen appliances hadn’t sprouted dicks yet.
“I blew in on the wind then JJ found me and kidnapped me,” she said hollowly, throwing JJ a vengeful look.
Man, she’d always been fiery but this girl looked like she had the devil himself blowing flames up her ass. Did we deserve that? Maybe. But it still pissed me off when she turned those hell flames on me.
“I did do that,” JJ said with a smirk, moving up against my other shoulder and resting his weight on me. “And I’d do it again. And again. And ag-”
“Shut it,” I snarled and JJ fell quiet as I leaned in close to Rogue, one percent of me just wanting to see if she still smelled like coconut and sea air.
“Are you sniffing me?” she gasped, planting her hands on my chest and that unbidden growl rose in my throat again. The fuck was happening to me right now?
I huffed out a breath, tasting that familiar scent on my tongue and wanting to seek out more of it, bottle it, fucking trademark that shit in my name.
“You totally sniffed her, dude,” JJ laughed and I turned, knocking him aside and walking away.
I just needed to breathe something that wasn’t her, something that didn’t make me want to find the nearest set of handcuffs and tether her to me forever. I’d put my love for Rogue to bed a long time ago. I’d lived through the heartache. I’d pined and hurt and my entire chest had hollowed out with the loss of her. My heart had never let another girl in, not even close. But her being back hadn’t factored into my new life. I’d let go. We all had. We’d had no fucking choice. But now…now what the fuck was I supposed to do?
I moved to stand on the other side of the kitchen island, facing them all as Chase lifted an arm and rested it above her head on the fridge, drinking her in with a sneer on his lips.
“Who hurt you?” I asked her the question that was baiting me most.
A part of me wanted to believe that this had somehow been an accident, because picturing some motherfucker with his hands wrapped around her throat was about to turn me into an even bigger serial killer than I already was. But those fingerprints were an admission of their own. Someone, some rat, some fucking scum had done that to her. And I would not rest until they lay in pieces at my feet.
“Oh this?” she asked sarcastically, pointing at her neck. “I got in a fight with a seagull over an ice cream. The gulls ‘round here have gotten real violent.”
“That’s not funny,” JJ hissed and I nodded my agreement while Chase’s eye just twitched with the rage in him.
“Anyways, this has been so much fun,” she said girlishly, ducking out from under Chase’s arm and dancing past JJ as he tried to catch her.
She made it to the sliding door as JJ moved to block the only other exit and she spun around to look at us, warning us off with her eyes as me and Chase took a step toward her too. “But I’m gonna go and do something even more fun than hanging out with you guys. Like letting that murderous seagull peck my eyes out before ramming a surfboard up my own ass. Ciao!”
She darted out the door and the three of us walked calmly after her, stepping outside and watching as she jogged around the enclosed pool area. She gazed up at the high wall on the opposite side of the pool then hurried up to the stone barbeque, climbed onto it and leapt forward, catching the top of the wall by the tips of her fingers. My gut lurched as she started hauling herself up and I cursed, charging around the pool toward her with JJ in tow.
I leapt up, grabbing the back of her denim shorts in my fist and tugging hard. She clung onto the wall and I half uncovered her peachy ass as her shorts and bikini bottoms slid down, my fingers dipping between her cheeks as she fought to climb up. My dick got a lot of filthy ideas about the feel of her soft flesh against my hand and I held on tighter, refusing to let her go. She shot curses at me as JJ caught one of her legs and the two of us yanked her down off the wall. She kicked and punched like a girl in desperate need of an exorcist, but she could have had ten demons possessing her and I still would have fought to keep this woman in my house.
I caught her waist as we lowered her down between us and her eyes widened at the sight of me scowling at her.
“You’re not going anywhere, hummingbird,” I growled, using the nickname I’d once given her, the same reason I had a hummingbird with gold tipped wings tattooed on the inside of my left forearm. It held power, that name. And her throat bobbed as I pinned her in my eyes, cracking her façade for half a heartbeat. I leaned in near to her face, my heart pounding and my chest heaving at how close I’d almost come to losing her again. “I used to spend a lot of time thinking about what I’d do if you ever came back, Rogue. And the long and short of it is, baby, that I’m never letting you get away again.”
Her fist came at me and I refused to release her to block it, her knuckles slamming hard into my mouth. I tasted blood and anger rippled through me like thunder.
“Shit Rogue, do you realise who he is these days?” JJ gasped just before I tore her away from him, tucking her under one arm and locking her to my side as I strode toward the house.
“I’m getting the feeling he’s an asshole!” she called back to him, but I didn’t give a shit.
I was an asshole. And I also held all the power in this town, so I was gonna do whatever the fuck I liked. Because I’d waited too long for her and spent too much of my life fearing what had happened after we’d lost her. I’d never allowed myself to consider the possibility that she was dead. That something beyond my control had happened to her and taken her from this world. And now she was here, I fully intended to make sure that nothing ever happened to her again.
Chase was looking between us all with wide eyes and one hand clawing into his hair as I stormed past him with Rogue struggling against my hold. I stalked through the house, kicking doors open and sensing JJ and Chase hot on my heels. I knocked open a guest bedroom, striding inside and tossing her onto the bed so she bounced across it, spitting curses at me.
I locked the window, tucking the key into my pocket before heading for the
door. Then I stepped outside, slamming it shut half a second before she collided with it and I twisted the key in the lock, pocketing that too.
“Motherfucker!” she screamed.
“Come on, dude, you can’t keep her in there,” JJ tried to reason with me, but I shouldered past him.
“I need to think.” I walked outside so I didn’t have to hear her kicking the door and calling me every dirty word in her vocabulary.
I paced outside under the glaring sun and Chase moved to my side, his arm brushing mine.
“We can just drive her back to wherever she came from,” he growled.
“What?” I snarled, rounding on him, my heart thundering at the mere suggestion of sending her away again. “Why the fuck would you say that?”
His jaw locked for a moment and lines of tension formed on his brow. “She’s not good for you, man. She’s not good for any of us.”
I shoved my palms into his chest, my teeth bared in fury. “Don’t fucking talk about her like that.”
“We searched for her and she nearly broke us because she was gone!” Chase shouted, his muscles flexing furiously. “I’m not watching that shit show again. We need to deal with this now before she gets her claws into any of us again.”
“She’s not going anywhere,” I said dangerously, getting up in his face. If he wanted to push me on this, he was going to regret it.
“Agreed,” JJ chipped in, but I didn’t look back at him. I glared at Chase, waiting for him to back down. And finally, he turned his cheek, tutting under his breath. He knew I’d win either way. This wasn’t a debate. And if there was anything in the world I was going to pull my King of the Harlequins card on him for, it was this. I was the boss, and she was staying. No one would tell me otherwise.
I drew in a steadying breath as Chase stood there looking like a wounded animal, then I turned my back on him and looked to JJ.
“Where’d you find her?” I growled.
“She showed up at the club. She was sleeping in a Jeep. Not hers. Looked stolen to me considering she had literally nothing with her but a ratty little dog.”
I started pacing again, the fury at knowing she’d been living like that making me too angry to function. But there was something far, far worse than even that gnawing at me. Something I simply couldn’t get out of my head.
“Who gave her those bruises?” I hissed, barely able to get the words past my lips. I’d plant every bullet I had in the motherfucker who dared hurt her. I would remove limbs, sever arteries, rip out every single organ-
“She won’t say,” JJ said, planting his shoulder against one of the struts that held up the awning on this side of the pool.
“Oh she’ll say alright,” I growled, marching forward to head inside again, but JJ held out a hand, pressing it against my shoulder to halt me.
His touch wasn’t firm, but I gave him my attention, knowing I didn’t always act rationally when I lost my head like this. Maybe I needed his voice of reason right now, because mine was long gone.
“Give her some time to cool off. You already locked her up, she’s gonna be as pissed as a caged bobcat right now.”
“And you think time’s gonna improve that?” I scoffed.
He moved closer, smiling but there was a storm swirling in his brown eyes. “Can’t hurt.”
I went to shove past him anyway, then paused, a thought occurring to me. “You mentioned a ratty dog…”
“It’s out on the porch.” He smirked as he caught on to what I meant and he twisted away from me, disappearing into the house in the direction of the front door.
“Don’t do this, man,” Chase begged from behind me and I glanced back at him. He was tapping a cigarette against the box in his hand, his eyes imploring.
“She’s one of us,” I said ferociously, daring him to test me on this.
“So was Maverick,” he countered darkly and those words drove into my skin like needles.
My lip peeled back to berate him, but JJ reappeared with a little white dog in his arms, scratching its head and making its eyes droop happily.
“Here, give him to me.” I took the dog from his arms and it immediately started chewing my hand as I carried him down the hall then pounded my fist on the door to the room she was locked inside.
“What?” she snapped.
“I’ve got your dog,” I said and she gasped.
“Don’t hurt him, you fucking bastard!”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m not going to hurt him. I came to give him to you.”
She fell quiet for a moment and I reached into my pocket for the key, pushing it into the lock and twisting. I knocked the door open and the devastation beyond it was pretty unfathomable for how little time she’d had in here. The curtains were ripped down, the bedsheets torn to ribbons, the closet doors looked half ripped off their hinges and anything that had been in the drawers was now scattered everywhere.
She reached for the dog demandingly but I lifted him up above my head on one hand. “Come out here and talk to us,” I ordered and she glowered at me like she was trying to rip my throat out with her eyes alone.
Her upper lip peeled back for a moment then she schooled her features, tossed her hair and shrugged. “Fine.”
She held out her hands for the dog and I placed the little mutt in her arms. She hugged him to her chest as if I was going to snatch him back from her at any second and gut him, but I wasn’t interested in the dog. I was interested in her, and who the fuck had laid their filthy hands on her body. Hands I was going to enjoy cutting off in payment for this unspeakable act against her.
I gestured for her to walk ahead of me and she did so, my gaze immediately dropping to her ass peeking out from those tight denim shorts she wore, and I wet my lips with how much I wanted to sink my teeth into that tanned flesh. My cock throbbed like I was a virgin aching for his first taste of pussy and I felt like one again too. A fucking teenager lusting after his best friend. A girl who I would have done anything for. Who I would still do anything for.
JJ stood in the kitchen with his elbows pressed to the island and Chase stood behind him with his arms folded and smoke seeping between his teeth like a pissed off dragon.
I moved up close behind Rogue, then leaned past her, tugging a stool out at the island and gesturing for her to sit.
“Yeah…no, I’m good,” she said coolly, moving away from me to stand on her own side of the island, stroking the dog’s head while she looked between us all with a casual disinterest.
“Who hurt you?” I growled, the rage in me pooling up to the surface, barely able to be contained.
“A guy,” she said lightly, shrugging one shoulder, but I guessed that was progress from the seagull bullshit.
“Which guy?” I snarled the exact same time JJ and Chase did. For all Chase’s bullshit about getting rid of her, he suddenly seemed seriously interested in getting that answer. We all would have died for her once. That apparently hadn’t changed for me. And one sweeping glance at my friends’ faces told me it hadn’t changed for them either.
“Not your business,” she said airily. “Just like the rest of my life isn’t your business. Like it hasn’t been for ten years actually.”
“Why are you back?” Chase bit at her, but I didn’t snap at him for his tone because I needed the answer to that as keenly as I needed air to breathe.
“Not your business,” she answered in that same light tone as if we were nothing to her. And maybe we were. Maybe she’d moved on a long time ago and we were just a distant memory which she never bothered thinking about. The idea of that pained me in a way I could barely digest.
“Not our business?” JJ tsked, shaking his head. “You have no idea, do you?”
“Pfft, she knows,” Chase muttered, glaring at her.
“I know what?” she asked like she didn’t really care, but her eyes gave away just enough curiosity that I knew she did.
“You want answers from us? Then you’d better start giving them yourself,” I warned an
d her eyes slid onto me, cutting deep into my soul, reawakening every part of the kid in me who’d obsessed over this girl for his entire life.
“Fine…I’m here to get my asshole bleached, they’ve got the best beauty salon this side of Sunset Cove. Your turn,” she deadpanned and JJ burst out laughing.
He was the only one though, because Chase practically inhaled his entire cigarette and my teeth started grinding as she continued to withhold this information from me.
“Why were you sleeping in a car?” I pressed.
“Because I don’t have a fancy house like this one to count fluffy little sheep in when I go to sleep at night,” she said, acting like this was all some joke to her.
Was I a joke to her? Was everything I’d shared with her long forgotten? Did I not hold any place in her heart anymore? I knew it was stupid to think that she might have missed me, but I’d clung onto the hope that wherever she was she’d at least thought of me from time to time. The possibility that she hadn’t was threatening to break me all over again.
“Where did you come from?” I snapped, starting to lose it with her bullshit answers.
“Careful, Foxy, it looks like you’re about to bust a vein over wittle old me,” she taunted. “Wouldn’t want it to seem like you missed me or anything.”
“Missed you?” I spat, stalking toward her, gripping her shirt in my fist and yanking her closer so the little dog was pressed between us where it started growling. “Those words are a fucking mockery of what I went through when we lost you. What we all went through.”
“Poor lost boys, how hard it must have been for you all to forget about me. It wasn’t that hard for me by the way, I thought you were called Badger when I arrived until JJ used your real name.”
The little dog yapped angrily at me as heated fury slid over me like a second skin. I had so much to say to her and yet all the things I’d pictured telling her over the years that I’d searched for her just faded away now she was really here. I’d never once expected her to look at me like that when I finally had her back. She hated me. And it might have been worse than that. Because it looked like she just wanted to walk out of this house and be rid of us for good. But why come back then? Why show up in this town, of all the towns on the west coast? She must have known we’d find her. So why come? Why now?
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